1. Field
Embodiments of the invention relate to improved operations in a virtual environment and, in particular, to systems and methods for provisioning one or more virtual machines or virtual machine files.
2. Description of Related Art
Many companies take advantage of virtualization solutions to consolidate several specialized physical servers and workstations into fewer servers running virtual machines. Each of these virtual machines can be configured with its own set of virtual hardware, such as a processor, memory, ports, and the like. In particular, a virtualization layer, or hypervisor, allocates the computing resources of one or more host servers to the virtual machines and further provides for isolation between such virtual machines.
In many virtual machine implementations, each virtual machine is associated with at least one virtual machine disk or image located in one or more files in a data store. The virtual machine disk can include files associated with a file system of a guest operating system for the virtual machine. The virtual machine disk can be copied, moved, backed up, or the like, similar to a general data file.